Vacation

Girl: You bloody whore.

Boy: Yeah...a bloody expensive one.

Girl: Hah!

Boy: You are boring. I thought you would ask my price.

Girl: I know your price. 23 thousand, nai?

Boy: And what’s the calculation there? 1 thousand per year?

Girl: Neah. That’s what you earn.

Boy: Shesh! Anything. You know what? Let’s fix a price now. Suppose its 1 thousand per year.

Girl: Ookay? Now, that’s too low a price for you my prince.

Boy: Well, its 1 thousand per year till 18. But after that it’s a young boy’s innocence that I’m taking care of. Very wanton, very unscrupulous. So 5 thousand per year after that. 18 thousand and 30 thousand makes it 48 thousand. That’s my price.

Girl: Nice. Is this what you do at The Firm? Think up loony logic for pricing otherwise cheap objects? What are you so thinking about, eh?

Boy: Your rate, ofcourse.

Girl: Yeah, right. Scamp!

Boy: Supposing the 1 grand price for you too till the cherry starts assuming real value. When does that happen to you guys? 16? 10? 13? Not 18. That’s old.

Girl: Scamp!

Boy: What would you sell for? Don’t give jazz like my cherry. Priceless.

Girl: Why don’t you tell me, then?

Boy: Never really thought about it. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell. I want to hear it from you.

Girl: Ah, bull. Though it’s not priceless. A diamond necklace? A ring maybe. Diamond.

Boy: Wow! That’s nowhere near priceless. Although I’ll have to sell myself twice over for even that ring. Implies I could never have your misuage, that holy cherry.

Girl: No, but if it’s you I could go a little cheap. A solitaire ring should do.

Boy: I’ll still have to sell myself, you see.

Girl: Dirt.

Kids! *Sigh*

No book, no writer, no one has ever made me so acutely conscious of my language as a recent Orkut testimonial. Such intensity. No, not intensity. Orgasmicity. Such orgasmicity of emotions, such torrent of profound words, such impossible orthography, such mad lovemaking with the language, you sit, shift, cringe, grin with a drop of tear and read the ejaculation once again, again and again. Kind of orgasm ( expression is really not the word here. Please bear with me ! ) only capable for people who have recently discovered it. Eighteeners, I say!
Here is what I am talking about. Oh, and if you get any real insight about what the writer is testimonying about, please! Hint: I found this on my friend's profile.

I feel honoured to write a few words for my prodigious frd..
My fingerzz r assigned 2 keyboard at present bt m in articulate of words...
Its not so easy to write about him....coz hes an immensily talented guy...... but after meeting him wht experience i had.....i will jolt down here...he is such a consortment of ingenous entity dat it wud eventually b unattainable to delineate abt his disposition..dis amiable frnd of mine wid a benignant serenity on his comely face is xtrmly bounteous n complaisant at heart....u juss talk to him once n u gonna dive in an ocean of such a mellifluous n soothin colloquy 4m him u dont wanna cum out.. Friend is a guy with a unbeatable brain and a heart full of enthusiasm..when it comes to sweetness i bet no one can beat him... I wonder how he manages so many things. he never lets any1 enter his sorrows.... but true frnds find out...... i pray to god tht my frndship wid friend continues till ma last breath....keep smiling...cheers!

Note: I have used some words you would never find in a dictionary. What do you expect!

On the nature of memory and the art of novel.

I am obviously not going to write anything on the topic. Just came along a very interesting observation by Kundera in his collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed. This blog, nostalgia being its prominent motif, would do good to have it in its patio.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present - the concreteness of the present - as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the casual sequence of a story.

Oh, the name!

In that last tag I mentioned a book, Sculpting in Time which I wished I had. News: I still don't have it. Crosswords has a genie-like sounding service called dial-a-book and I had their number saved for quite a while without really having to make use of it. Make use of it I did, yesterday, for Sculpting and heres how the conversation between me and a Crosswords executive went :

Me: Hi, I was wondering if you have this book called Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Executive: Sir, who is the Author?

( I would have been a little surprised if Sculpting in Time was the Author of Andrei Tarkovsky )

Me: Andrei Tarkovsky?

Executive: Oh!, Sir, Can you spell that last name for me? Its D . . . ?

Me: No, no. It's T. Uhh, T as in Tea?

Executive: As in Delhi?

Me: No, no. As in Thane...Uhh...Train.

Executive: Ok?

Me: Oh, alright. T as in train, A as in apple, R as in romeo, K as in key, O as in org . . . uhh, oscar?, V as in victor, S as in sugar, K as in key and Y as in you.

Executive: Sir?

Me: I meant Y-O-U. Ahh, Y as in yankee?

Executive: Sir, and the first name?

Me: Andrei? Its like the word "and" and then R as in romeo, E as in elephant and I as in India.

Executive: Please hold sir ( and poof! )

Those 3-4 agonizing minutes I waited like a pregnant lady - girl for yes, boy for no.

Executive: Sir, we used to have this book some time back but don't have a copy anymore. If you waant I can order one but it's going to be extremely difficult. The last book was bought in 1992 at Chennai.

With a haila! feeling I asked him to still order it and see if he got some other books on my list.

Executive: ( with a bored, Wt F-doesn't-he-have-any-work, raised left eyebrows, lowered right corner of the lips tone ) Okay.

Me: Great, the first one is Reason to Live by Amy Hempel.

Executive: Last name of the Author, Sir?

Me: Hempel. H-E-M-P-E-L.

Executive: Okay, H-E-M-B-E-L?

Me: No! P. As in Pain? Pakistan!

Executive: And what's the name of the book?

With raised expectations and a smile I told the name.

Executive: We do not have that book by Hempel.

Me: Oh, so which one do you have?

Executive: Actually we do not have any book by Hempel.

Me: I see. And, how about Clown Girl by Monica Drake?

Executive: ( On his deathbed of boredom or exhaustion or exasperation or something similar ) Is it D-R-A-K-E?

Me: ( with a pleasant surprise in the midst of ruins ) Yes, yeah!

Executive: No sir. We do not have anything by Drake Monica, either.

Me: Look, thats quite unbelievable. Whats the contact for Landmark?

Executive: Sorry Sir, I don't have that.

A neat zero probability of finding anything at Crosswords. Cute.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I love the music" acquires a totally different meaning when stupid maharashtrian punks does the pointing downward 'bizness' like the eminemised, bling-cartoons on TV while listening to bam-bam hip-hop, 12db flat.